clock — watching time, the only true currency

A month ago, Vin sent me a box full of books, including several Robert Sawyer novels. I’ve enjoyed earlier reads, and Flashforward was a quick romp.
Courtesy of a supercollider experiment, the world gets a glimpse of its future 21 years out. Sawyer takes a swing at the mundane (patent office is overwhelmed with applications based [...]

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The Naïve and Sentimental Lover was the next book in my John Le Carré sequence, at least by chronology.
The problem?
The first hundred pages or so did not draw me in. Usually, I’ll plug away. I hate dropping a book unfinished. But I’m going to suspend my usual practice here. I’ve long since moved on [...]

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I found the final book of the His Dark Materials trilogy, The Amber Spyglass, a bit loose. No untidy loose ends, but Philip Pullman uses more words to describe less action as the climax approaches. I do appreciate the bittersweet ending, though. You don’t get to save the world and live happily ever after. Think [...]

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Book 2 of His Dark Materials passed in a flash last week. The Subtle Knife continues Philip Pullman’s trilogy, and introduces the not-so-subtly named Mary Malone, the former nun turned physicist. These tales twist, and are complete independently, but the sweep across all three books taken together is marvelous.

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I was heading somewhere I knew I’d have to wait, so I grabbed John Steinbeck’s thin novella Of Mice and Men off the shelf. A few pages in, I realized I’d read it before, but didn’t remember details. Anyway, 118 pages later, I knew why Lennie had to die, just like their dreams. It’s not [...]

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Via Slashdot, I learn that Neal Stephenson’s new novel is coming in September. Not pre-ordering right now, but on the list.

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It’s Not You, It’s Your Books, a recent essay in the New York Times, includes this snippet.
Let’s face it — this may be a gender issue. Brainy women are probably more sensitive to literary deal breakers than are brainy men. (Rare is the guy who’d throw a pretty girl out of bed for revealing her [...]

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Daylight Savings Time provided an excuse for the New York Times to run the Op-Ed column Time Out Of Mind a couple of weeks ago. The author, Stefan Klein, blends scientific studies and literary references to remind us that measuring time leads to changed perceptions of same. Stress and mistakes are also common for those [...]

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I bought Deep Storm by Lincoln Child in the airport for the airplane, but never got to it until riding the bus to work last week. Took me maybe three bus rides to finish. Pure cotton candy: tastes OK while you’re eating it, but nothing there. It was my recovery book after Fisk.

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The name Robert Fisk was new to me when my friend Chris dropped this weighty-in-every-sense book on me many weeks ago. A reporter for the UK newspaper The Independent for several decades, Fisk has his own unofficial website. This is an advocacy site, though not affiliated with Fisk himself. Why does a reporter who lives [...]

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